Objective Communication Patterns Associated With Team Member Effectiveness in Real-World Virtual Teams

OBJECTIVE

We explore the relationships between objective communication patterns displayed during virtual team meetings and established, qualitative measures of team member effectiveness.

BACKGROUND

A key component of teamwork is communication. Automated measures of objective communication patterns are becoming more feasible and offer the ability to measure and monitor communication in a scalable, consistent and continuous manner. However, their validity in reflecting meaningful measures of teamwork processes are not well established, especially in real-world settings.

METHOD

We studied real-world virtual student teams working on semester-long projects. We captured virtual team meetings using the Zoom video conferencing platform throughout the semester and periodic surveys comprising peer ratings of team member effectiveness. Leveraging audio transcripts, we examined relationships between objective measures of speaking time, silence gap duration and vocal turn-taking and peer ratings of team member effectiveness.

RESULTS

Speaking time, speaking turn count, degree centrality and (marginally) speaking turn duration, but not silence gap duration, were positively related to individual-level team member effectiveness. Time in dyadic interactions and interaction count, but not interaction length, were positively related to dyad-level team member effectiveness.

CONCLUSION

Our study highlights the relevance of objective measures of speaking time and vocal turn-taking to team member effectiveness in virtual project-based teams, supporting the validity of these objective measures and their use in future research.

APPLICATION

Our approach offers a scalable, easy-to-use method for measuring communication patterns and team member effectiveness in virtual teams and opens the opportunity to study these patterns in a more continuous and dynamic manner.

Team Combat Identification: Effects of Gender, Spatial Visualization, and Disagreement

OBJECTIVE

The combat identification (CID) abilities of same-gender and mixed-gender dyads were experimentally assessed, along with measures of spatial skills and team communication.

BACKGROUND

CID is a high-stakes decision-making task involving discrimination between friendly and enemy forces. Literature on CID is primarily focused on the individual, but the extensive use of teams in the military means that more team-based research is needed in this area.

METHOD

After a set of training sessions, 39 dyads were tasked with identifying 10 armored vehicles in a series of pictures and videos. Team communication was recorded, transcribed, and coded for instances of disagreements.

RESULTS

Analyses indicated that males scored higher on a spatial visualization measure than did females. M-M teams performed significantly better than M-F teams on the CID task, but when spatial ability and team disagreements were added as predictors, the effect of team gender composition became nonsignificant. Spatial ability and team disagreement were significant predictors of team CID performance.

CONCLUSION

Results suggest that spatial skills and team disagreement behaviors are more important for team CID performance than a team's gender composition. To our knowledge, this is the first lab study of team CID.

APPLICATION

This research highlights the importance of understanding both individual differences (e.g., spatial skills) and team processes (e.g., communication) within CID training environments in the military context.

Concerns About Verbal Communication in the Operating Room: A Field Study

OBJECTIVE

To assess verbal communication patterns which could contribute to poor performance among surgical team members in an operating room.

BACKGROUND

There exist certain challenges in communication in health care settings. Poor communication can have negative effects on the performance of a surgical team and patient safety. A communication pattern may be associated with poor performance when the process of sending and receiving information is interrupted or the content of conversation is not useful.

METHOD

This cross-sectional field study was conducted with 54 surgical teams working in two Iranian hospitals during 2015. Two observers recorded all verbal communications in an operating room. An in-depth assessment of various annotated transcripts by an expert panel was used to assess verbal communication patterns in the operating room.

RESULTS

Verbal communication patterns which could contribute to poor performance were observed in 63% of the surgeries, categorized as communication failures (17 events), protests (23 events), and irrelevant conversations (164 events). The anesthesiologists and the circulating nurses had the most concerning communication patterns. The failure of devices and poor planning were important factors that contributed to concerning patterns.

CONCLUSION

Concerning patterns of verbal communication are not rare in operating rooms. Analyzing the annotated transcripts of surgeries can conduce to identifying all these patterns, and their causes. Concerning communication patterns can be reduced in the operating room by providing interventions, properly planning for surgeries, and fixing defective devices.

APPLICATION

The method used in this study can be followed to assess communication problems in operating rooms and to find solutions.

Measuring Real-Time Team Cognition During Team Training

OBJECTIVE

A method for detecting real-time changes in team cognition in the form of significant communication reorganizations is described. We demonstrate the method in the context of scenario-based simulation training.

BACKGROUND

We present the dynamical view that individual- and team-level aspects of team cognition are temporally intertwined in a team's real-time response to challenging events. We suggest that this real-time response represents a fundamental team cognitive skill regarding the rapidity and appropriateness of the response, and methods and metrics are needed to track this skill.

METHOD

Communication data from medical teams (Study 1) and submarine crews (Study 2) were analyzed for significant communication reorganization in response to training events. Mutual information between team members informed post hoc filtering to identify which team members contributed to reorganization.

RESULTS

Significant communication reorganizations corresponding to challenging training events were detected for all teams. Less experienced teams tended to show delayed and sometimes ineffective responses that more experienced teams did not. Mutual information and post hoc filtering identified the individual-level inputs driving reorganization and potential mechanisms (e.g., leadership emergence, role restructuring) underlying reorganization.

CONCLUSION

The ability of teams to rapidly and effectively reorganize coordination patterns as the situation demands is a team cognitive skill that can be measured and tracked.

APPLICATION

Potential applications include team monitoring and assessment that would allow for visualization of a team's real-time response and provide individualized feedback based on team member's contributions to the team response.

Understanding Digital Checklist Use Through Team Communication

Introducing technology support in a complex, team-based work setting requires a study of teamwork effects on technology use. In this paper, we present our initial analysis of team communications in a trauma resuscitation setting, where we deployed a digital checklist to support trauma team leaders in guiding patient care. By analyzing speech transcripts, checklist interaction logs, and videos of 15 resuscitations, we identified several tensions that arose from the use of a checklist in a team-based process with multi-step tasks. The tensions included incorrect markings of in-progress tasks as completed, failure to mark completed tasks due to missed communications, failure to record planned tasks, and difficulties in recording dynamic values. From these findings, we discuss design implications for checklist design for dynamic, team-based activities.

Objective Measures of Communication Behavior Predict Clinical Performance

OBJECTIVE

Effective teamwork and communication are critical to patient outcomes, and subjective assessment tools have been studied in predicting team performances. However, inherent biases remain while using subjective assessment tools. This study hypothesizes that objective communication features can assess and predict clinical performance.

DESIGN

Forty 3rd-year medical students participated in the Acute Care Trauma Simulation as the role of doctor, teaming up with a nurse confederate and a simulated patient. Participants conducted postoperative patient management, patient care diagnoses, and treatment. Audio from all team members were recorded, speech variables (e.g., speech duration, number of conversations, etc.) were extracted, and statistical analyses were performed to associate communication with clinical performance.

SETTING

This study was performed at the simulation center located at Fairbanks Hall, Indiana University School of Medicine.

PARTICIPANTS

Data from forty 3rd-year medical students were collected and analyzed.

RESULTS

Majority (67%) of the communications were initiated by student. Speech ratio, intensity, and frequency of communications differed when students communicate with nurse than with patient (e.g., student communication to patient had higher intensity than nurse). Increasing frequency of check-backs between student and nurse (p < 0.05) and speech duration from student to patient (p = 0.001) positively associated with student's clinical performance score.

CONCLUSION

Objective communication features can predict medical trainee's clinical performance and provide an objective approach for simulation-based trauma care training.

Person-Centered Communication for Nursing Home Residents With Dementia: Four Communication Analysis Methods

Person-centered communication recognizes the individual as a person and responds to the individual's feelings, preferences, and needs. This secondary analysis tested four interdisciplinary strategies to measure changes in person-centered communication used by nursing home staff following an intervention. Thirty-nine nursing assistants were recruited from 11 nursing homes and participated in the three-session Changing Talk communication training. Video recordings were collected at baseline, immediately postintervention, and at 3-month follow-up. Staff communication was analyzed using behavioral, psycholinguistic, and emotional tone coding of elderspeak communication and content analysis of communication topics. Sign rank test was used to compare postintervention changes for each measure of communication. Postintervention improvements in communication occurred for each measure; however, the changes were statistically significant only for behavioral and psycholinguistic measures. Methods and results for each communication measure were compared. Implications for future research and use of measures of person-centered communication as a tool to improve care are discussed.

Understanding and Modeling Teams As Dynamical Systems

By its very nature, much of teamwork is distributed across, and not stored within, interdependent people working toward a common goal. In this light, we advocate a systems perspective on teamwork that is based on general coordination principles that are not limited to cognitive, motor, and physiological levels of explanation within the individual. In this article, we present a framework for understanding and modeling teams as dynamical systems and review our empirical findings on teams as dynamical systems. We proceed by (a) considering the question of why study teams as dynamical systems, (b) considering the meaning of dynamical systems concepts (attractors; perturbation; synchronization; fractals) in the context of teams, (c) describe empirical studies of team coordination dynamics at the perceptual-motor, cognitive-behavioral, and cognitive-neurophysiological levels of analysis, and (d) consider the theoretical and practical implications of this approach, including new kinds of explanations of human performance and real-time analysis and performance modeling. Throughout our discussion of the topics we consider how to describe teamwork using equations and/or modeling techniques that describe the dynamics. Finally, we consider what dynamical equations and models do and do not tell us about human performance in teams and suggest future research directions in this area.

Implicit Coordination Strategies for Effective Team Communication

OBJECTIVE

We investigated implicit communication strategies for anticipatory information sharing during team performance of tasks with varying degrees of complexity. We compared the strategies used by teams with the highest level of performance to those used by the lowest-performing teams to evaluate the frequency and methods of communications used as a function of task structure.

BACKGROUND

High-performing teams share information by anticipating the needs of their teammates rather than explicitly requesting the exchange of information. As the complexity of a task increases to involve more interdependence among teammates, the impact of coordination on team performance also increases. This observation motivated us to conduct a study of anticipatory information sharing as a function of task complexity.

METHOD

We conducted an experiment in which 13 teams of four people performed collaborative search-and-deliver tasks with varying degrees of complexity in a simulation environment. We elaborated upon prior characterizations of communication as implicit versus explicit by dividing implicit communication into two subtypes: (a) deliberative/goal information and (b) reactive status updates. We then characterized relationships between task structure, implicit communication, and team performance.

RESULTS

We found that the five teams with the fastest task completion times and lowest idle times exhibited higher rates of deliberative communication versus reactive communication during high-complexity tasks compared with the five teams with the slowest completion times and longest idle times (p = .039).

CONCLUSION

Teams in which members proactively communicated information about their next goal to teammates exhibited improved team performance.

APPLICATION

The findings from our work can inform the design of communication strategies for team training to improve performance of complex tasks.